Lore:SolFed

FACTION

Sol Federation

Other Names: SolFed Related Lore: Lore:Space, Lore:Sol Languages: Sol CommonAnd when contact was established, the Admiral waved at the screen and said, "Mi parolas la lingvon de la Homines!" - I speak the language of Mankind. A simplified mix of Esperanto and Modern Latin, and the only recognized official language of the Sol Federation. This peculiar constructed language became popular during SolFed's earliest days, and was almost entirely overtaken by other popular tongues - it became widespread through heavy-handed political maneuvering with the help of corporate bureaucrats and other undesirables. Nowadays, it's a near-universal tongue and a must-know for any sentient being that plans to leap forward into space. Contributors: OwegnoOwegno., TrilliumContributions by Riley Stelle!

The Sol Federation, commonly SolFed, is an international organization centered around preventing conflict between and providing mutual aid to its member states. Physically spanning a large region of space in and beyond the Orion arm, and culturally spanning a diverse population of both human-derived and alien nations, SolFed maintains that each member state is a fully independent nation, restricted only by the laws set forth by the ever-changing SolFed charter.

History

SolFed was founded in 2212 in response to prolonged hostilities in Sol, suddenly concluded by the arrival of a damaged ship from the Grand Mothic Fleet. SolFed's history is characterized by its cycle of rapid expansion and lengthy consolidation, a fertile foundation for the steady rot of SolFed's idealized unity.

International Space Administration

The idea of a truly unified humanity began in the mid-22nd century during the colonization of Sol under the direction of the International Space Administration, a joint venture between the space faring powers of Earth to colonize and explore the solar system while avoiding conflict between them. Initially confined to the realm of new political thinkers, UnificationismA movement to abandon or minimize existing human nations and unite under a single banner. Ironically, the movement itself was highly disjoint, with coteries pushing for mutually exclusive omni-governments, ranging from a single unitary state to a broad federation.
No particular side claims absolute satisfaction with what SolFed would become, which remains a recurring theme with the Federation. slowly gained popular support, particularly among humans living in space. In 2178 SaturnSaturn's government was unified at the time, historians say. It still is, but it was, too. became the first nation to support Unificationism and was soon followed by ever more nations as the 22nd century steadily neared its end. By the end of the century, the idea had sizable support among both political elites and the general populace.

Despite this success there was increasing doubt among Unificationists if their dream could ever be realized. The ISA’s ability to mediate and solve disputes between the various space faring powers grew increasingly frayed and in 2209 disaster struck when a slowly brewing conflict between Mars on one side and groups on Earth and Luna on the other erupted into open conflict; one the ISA was powerless to de-escalate. In spite of widespread condemnation of the conflict by neutral nations within Sol the Martian Rebellion showed no sign of ending and it seemed set to continue for the foreseeable future. However, after two years of war a miracle happened: a stricken Mothic ship arrived in Sol and with its sudden appearance came a temporary end to the hostilities as both sides rushed to aid the Moths. This temporary cease fire was quickly turned into a peace treaty. Capitalizing on the peaceful and cooperative mood across Sol, various Unificationist politicians met and drafted a proposal for the creation of a Sol Federation. After five months of deliberation and negotiations, the Sol Union Treaty was signed on February 13, 2212, creating the Sol FederationAs a barebones skeleton on which to craft a stronger Federation. Later bills would establish both the language and proper voting procedure. The 2212 Linguistic Convergence Act formally established Sol Common as an inoffensive but robust language, linguistically equidistant from typical Earth languages of the time.
Unificationists had already been using various dialects prior to 2212, only formalizing the language as a means to test SolFed's new Senate procedures..

First Migration

The First Great Interstellar Migration followed almost immediately after SolFed's founding, as Mothic aid propelled human engineering teams to fabricate replicable designs for practical bluespace drives. By the late 2250s, SolFed would reach the limits of existing spacefaring technology and so settle into consolidating their hastily expanded borders. This drove a major upheaval in SolFed, as several now-mature extrasolar colonies found their inhabitants exploring "options" for self-rule. These internal revolutions and civil conflicts plaguing a good number of SolFed's members brought an overt end to the only period of internal unity SolFed would ever enjoy. Regional ideologies settled into two main camps in their reaction to the epidemic of uprisings:
Self-deterministsSupporting an individual colony's right to splinter from their superseding state and enter into SolFed independently. and CentralistsBelieve that diluting a population's voting power across multiple representatives is more damaging to their aims than internal compromise, and use that belief to justify retaining dissenting colonies at any cost..

The ideological conflict smoldered for decades, never sparking a hot war, eventually fading into confusion as finer lines erode at what little cohesion the two stances held. While SolFed would step in to hamper the greater atrocities in any particular revolution, SolFed as a whole sat back and let the civil disputes settle themselves until the resulting independent members could agree on SolFed membership. This disparity in aid and alleged favoritism led to some members forming side alliances for mutual interest, forming the prototype for Cliques of the modern era. Thus, SolFed remained intact in name, now acting as little more than the political battleground for self-interested Cliques to fight.

Second Migration

The 2320s saw new paradigms in starship design, greatly increasing the range and speed of bluespace travel. Fewer records of this period exist than the First Great Migration, as significantly more interests rapidly surged forth to settle new stars, far more than SolFed could track, let alone police. The lawless expansion thrived in the chaos, breeding numerous disputes and minor conflicts. While SolFed's frantic scrambling managed to prevent overt, direct wars between member states, lesser disputes and subterfuge dominated galactic norms until the late 2460s, as member borders once again grew too large to meaningfully defend, physically or ideologically.

In this period of toothless migration, approximately 2470, outright war breaks out between SolFed and Tizira as Tizirans attack several corewardCloser to the center of the Milky Way, not closer to the center of SolFed. South-east, if space were two-dimensional. SolFed member states. The realities of actual war further inflame SolFed's infighting, sparking new rivalries and irritating existing ones, even with the live conflicts isolated to a small stretch of borders.

Today, SolFed strains and buckles between the rivalries of conflicting Cliques, and the festering cracks and blooming rot are becoming harder to hide. SolFed's long-term viability grows increasingly in doubt, stagnation and self-interest the paints to an increasingly bleak picture.

Government

SolFed is controlled by the Federal Assembly (SFFA), a forum of representatives from each member state of the Federation. Each member chooses their own representatives with no standardized process, ranging from elections to nepotism. The voting power of each representative reflects the population of the member they represent, statistically normalized through archaic processes. The Federal Assembly has complete power over the Federation, dictating its laws and interpretations, funding and guiding various federal agencies, and enacting treaties between the Federation as a whole and external governments.

The Federal Assembly acts more as a performative stage for the various Cliques, groups of member states in formal or informal alliances, to dictate votes and measures. The exact nature of each Clique varies, but they tend to represent the interests and ideology uniting the various member states of the Clique. As no single Clique holds a strong monopoly on the power to pursue any sort of agenda within the Assembly, even the most straightforward of proposals are bogged down under compromises, bribes, and attempts to poach or sway individual members.

Departments

The Federal Assembly extends authority to numerous departments of the Federal Government, each tasked with the day-to-day handling of federal affairs, with both funding and direction set forth by laws. Notable departments include:

• The Sol Federation MarshalsProtect the frontiers of SolFed from local threats and assist member states with pursuing criminals outside of their borders.
• The Bureau of Space FlightThe BOSF determines space traffic rules and regulations, maximum docking fees, and issues federal starship licenses.
• The Bureau of PeopleTracks the population of SolFed through endless censuses, and ensures that their basic rights are not infringed.
• The Sol Federation Armed ForcesBroad department encompassing any form of multi-member organized force against threats both domestic and foreign.
• The Bureau of AstrographyWorks tirelessly to collate vast amounts of publicly available exploration data, combining it together into one of the most expansive starmaps in existence.

Federal Laws

SolFed's laws over her member states routinely change and evolve, so while the specifics may vary depending on the year, a small number of universally agreed upon ideals continue to reign:

• Freedom of navigation for all non-military spacecraft.
• A complete ban of slaverySolFed laws explicitly ban institutionalized slavery, and compel member states to explicitly deem smaller-scale slavery illegal, lest the entire state be charged with supporting institutionalized slavery.
  So while slavery is illegal across all of SolFed, whether you're executed or merely imprisoned depends on the applicable jurisdictions.
  Slavers will be held by the Bureau of People until such a time that an appropriate jurisdiction is settled upon, typically the victim's home, who are often in no rush to prosecute and thus remove them from SolFed custody. The various armed forces and patrols of SolFed have an informal competition around the capture of slavers, and notably do not have an informal competition around treating them humanely., and any other form of forced labor.
• No member state may wage war against, or in any other way attack, another member state.
• Protection for any sort of ecosystem hosting complex lifeforms.
• SolFed is funded through taxes collected from the member states directly, as opposed to direct individual collection.

OOC: There is no Space Law or SolFed Law practiced on NT Stations. (Rules) SolFed's laws are exclusively on the scale of binding interactions between member states and each other, or internal SolFed policiesThink voting procedures, how the Marshals get budget, minimum thresholds for new membership.. Nobody on-station is qualified to uphold SolFed's laws, let alone be governed directly by them. Corporate Regulations are the only applicable "laws" for station-goers and the like.

Cliques

While technically just informal bodies of like-minded voters, the various Cliques are the driving force of SolFed politics. Formal and informal alliances, rallied around common issues, weave together as almost a bureaucratic necessity when faced with the impossible scale of the thousands of legal proposals daily across easily as many individually voting members. While a Clique can exist at any scale, the difficulty of organizing unique cultures to agree upon common ground gives way to a universal law: The bigger the clique, the broader its aims. To that end, the most notable Cliques have simple missions and goals, and can be summarized in only a few paragraphs.

Notable Cliques coming soon.

Member States

SolFed's member states vary highly in both size and demographic, as what few restrictions on member entry exist are often bypassed as part of backroom deals between Cliques. Every member must abide by the Federation's laws, but for any arbitrary pair of member states, that may be the sole commonality. Thus, the exact culture of SolFed is transient at best, non-existent at worst, and varies strongly from region to region.

Notable member states include:

Corporate Territories

The Corporate Territories is a loose confederation of various corporate-owned or controlled systems, many coming from the various Sovereign Corporations. The territories are administered from LunaThe prominent natural moon of Earth, in the Sol system. by a governing council made up of appointed representatives from the various corporations that partake in the Corporate Territories project. The Council holds little power within the systems that make up the Corporate Territories as individual corporations retain nearly absolute power over their assets. Instead, the council presents a unified entity front for external diplomacy and runs coordinated efforts devoted to improving the profits of the Corporate Territories as a whole or protecting those profits. Following their creation, the Corporate Territories became the face of the pro-corporate Trade Clique and acts as the mouthpiece for corporate interests within SolFed. In contrast to the unity presented by the Corporate Territories, the reality is that the constant competition and conflict that dominates the corporate world is ever present within them, resulting in them being rife with corporate shenanigans and corruption.

Sovereign Corporations

As humanity sprinted out towards the stars during the First Migration, inevitably, capital would drive some ahead of the pack. Many of humanity's very first colonies were privately owned, a tradition which still exists today in the form of Sovereign Corporations. While many corporations were happy to sell their claimed (and oft colonized) land to interested SolFed members for profit and leverage, some chose to hold onto their land. The holdouts incorporated under the Federation as member states, and are allowed nearly as much autonomy as any other member of the interstellar union. Various sovcorps (Such as Nanotrasen and Interdyne) continue to exist today, and find themselves in a comfortable spot. Sovcorps have nearly all the same rights and freedoms as a member state, with only one exception: the Intercorporate Clause, which dictates that when conducting business within the territory of another member state, sovcorps are subject to that member state's laws regarding commerce, safety, workers’ rights, and otherwise.

Enkai

Enkai, officially the Republic of Enkai, is a middling SolFed nation located in the second ring of SolFed territory. Enkai had originally been settled by the Libraen Federation near the end of the First Great Interstellar Migration but won its independence without bloodshed after the planetary government took advantage of the Libraen’s being embroiled in numerous other conflicts with their colonies and declared independence. Once independent, Enkai was one of the founding members of what became the Frontier Clique, uniting with other nations on what was at the time the edge of SolFed space to counter the dominant power of the central SolFed nations in the Federal Assembly. While Enkai is no longer on the frontier, they remain a stalwart defender of small nations and are still one of the most prominent members of the Frontier Clique.

Tsogyal

Tsogyal is currently the largest singular producer of plasma within SolFed. It’s centered upon the Tsogyal System which is at the heart of a major anomalous zone making it incredibly rich in plasma and other anomalous materials. Upon its foundation in 2324 The Tsogyal Republic was the first major producer of plasma within human space and for a time held a complete monopoly on the resource. While other sources of plasma have been discovered, their monopoly has remained secure thanks to the Plasma Clique, an alliance of the various major plasma producing members of SolFed that cooperate to ensure the price of plasma is kept stable.

Libraea

The Libraen Federation is one of the largest and most politically influential members of SolFed. A longstanding member of the Center Clique their capital is Librae, formerly known as Beta Librae, with their territory stretching outwards from their capital throughout SolFed space thanks to a constant drive for further expansion from the Libraen government. This imperialist expansion and their pro-corporate stance have left the Libraen Federation with plenty of detractors with the strength of this animosity growing the further one gets from Sol. Power within the Libraen Federation is held primarily by elected officials coming from their systems close to Sol, and their various corporate backers, with the Libraen systems on the peripheries of SolFed space suffering from exploitation from corporations and at times the Libraen government. This has created a wide divide within Libraen society between those living in the highly developed systems and those who reside on the frontiers of Libraen space.

Sagittarian Triumvirate

The Sagittarian Triumvirate is the largest SolFed nation in the Sagittarius Transit, and one of the most prominent members of the Federation. The Triumvirate was created during the Second Great Interstellar Migration and would become the leader of the SolFed coalition during the Tiziro-Terran War. In response to the soft peace terms at the end of the war the Sagittarians have become a major political force within the Federation. They are the leader of the Unity Clique and push hard for both the expansion and militarization of SolFed to assimilate or defend against what they view as potentially hostile alien governments and to achieve their ultimate dream: a fully unified galaxy.

Work in Progress: Footer subject to change at a moment's notice. Do not take a red link's presence, struck-through or otherwise, as confirmation (or denial) of their canonicity.

Nova Sector Lore
	Common Species	Humans, Tiziran, Unathi, Moths, Ethereals, Azulae, Slime Hybrids, Teshari, Synthetic Humanoids (and assorted robots), Pod Persons
	Other Species	Genemodders (Felinids, Ice Walkers, Dwarf), Ashwalkers, Hemophages, Snailpersons, Ordoht (Formerly Skrell), Plasmamen, Flypeople, Vox (Primalis et al), Tajaran, Vulpkanin, Xenomorphic Hybrid, Rouges (Abductorkin), Miscellaneous Species
	Nanotrasen	Nanotrasen, Central Command, Emergency Response Corps
	External Groups	The Syndicate, Interdyne Pharmaceutics, DS-2, Cargo, The Spider Clan
	Nova	The Nova Sector, Indecipheres, Freyja
	Concepts	Bluespace, Plasma, Faster Than Light Travel, Resonance ("Souls"), Death
	SolFed	SolFed, Earth in 2565, The SolFed Armed Forces, The SolFed International Capital District